Strength in Unity: How Star Trek Beyond Frames Today’s World

Having recently seen Star Trek Beyond a second time in theaters, I walked away wondering if I should make a post detailing my thoughts. Being that this is a blog with a more-than-small emphasis on Star Trek, I felt that it would be warranted, however at the same time I wondered if it would be no more than a drop of water in the sea of recent reviews. Of course I came to the former conclusion, just as I always tend to do whenever wrestling with the dilemma of deciding to write something or not.

Given the fact that there are indeed plenty of reviews already floating around the internet and there is already a general positive fan and critic consensus surrounding the film, I’ll just get this out of the way: I liked it. In fact, I liked it very much. Is it my favorite Star Trek film? Definitely not, but it undoubtedly reinvigorated my excitement for the future of the franchise after having been somewhat pessimistic after 2013’s Star Trek: Into Darkness (note: As a fan, I still enjoy Into Darkness, but it didn’t seem to capture what I love about Star Trek – more on that another time).

Better critics and writers than me have written extensively about how Beyond fares cinematically, acting and plot-wise, so what I wanted to take the time to look at is what the film is trying to say. Ever since its inception 50 years ago, Star Trek has always been a “message” kind of franchise. Underneath the space opera has always been the philosophical – something many will argue has been missing from the newer film incarnations. In my opinion, Beyond is a return to form, or at least a step in the right direction.

Leaving the cinema after having seen the film the first time, I got the very basic message: peace and unity are more powerful than divisiveness. Simply put, that idea seems to be stating the obvious, but looking at the political climate of our world today, it begs repeating. From Krall’s (the primary antagonist) perspective, what we call peace and unity he sees as passive contentedness or weakness. Krall believes true strength comes from struggle and hardship.

After watching the film for the second time, as well as having the context of of Jordan Hoffman’s interviews with Simon Pegg & Doug Jung from the Engage podcast, I was able to dig into that theme a little deeper. In Hoffman’s interview with Pegg, they discuss the idea that Krall represents a very prominent attitude in our global political climate today – something I was able to notice and appreciate more during my second viewing. Globally, we’ve seen increased trends towards isolationism and nationalism, manifested through initiatives such as the recent Brexit as well as the phenomenon that is Donald Trump. The character of Krall embodies that attitude, seeing the idea of open arms (or open borders) as a weakness rather than an opportunity to pursue peace and harmony.

On the other side of the coin, the Federation, and by extension, the crew of the Enterprise, represent the prosperity of peace through strong alliances, unity, and diversity. It’s important to note that in the film, this core idea is not simply lip service. Star Trek Beyond makes a point to represent characters of diverse species, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations, yet at the same time makes the point that none of this is really a big deal. It is simply the way things are, and everyone accepts it (save Krall and crew) as the better way.

Much of how the Federation is presented gives credence to the phrase, “representation matters.” It’s one thing to discuss and talk about the merits of diversity, but it’s a much bigger step to truly show it. I was happy to see that in Beyond this idea was not only prominent within the story but through the production and casting as well. As evidence of this, we see the biggest additions to the cast are Sofia Boutella’s Jaylah and Idris Elba’s villainous Krall, and to a smaller extent, Shohreh Aghdashloo’s Commodore Paris.

Just as importantly behind the camera, Justin Lin served as Star Trek‘s first non-white film director while making it a priority to showcase the franchise’s progressive ideology, including representation, social commentary and self-reflection. “That’s in the mission statement when you’re part of Trek. It’s our job to try to be bold and push forward. You have to be conscious of that,” Lin explains in an interview with USA Today, “Star Trek is not just about literal exploration, but also the exploration of ourselves.”

All of this put together is what makes for good Star Trek. Justin Lin along with writers, Simon Pegg and Doug Jung, have crafted a fun and thought-provoking final product. It may not be perfect as there are plenty of plot elements and character motivations that I wished could have been fleshed out further, but the combination of the crew, cast (who, by the way, were all simply fantastic in their chemistry and portrayals) and the underlying spirit of the film, have returned the franchise to form – giving us Trek fans a sense of optimism for the future once again.

Strength in unity is only good for those who freely choose to share similarities within a given geographical location. The truth of the matter is not all cultures are compatible and not everyone can unify. Multiculturalism has been more of a disaster then ever a real solution. There will always be diversity and cultural displacements and sovereign nations and organizations and it is human nature and there is nothing wrong with this. There can not be a world with one large united government with the goal of space in mind. This is a silly dream of a child who remains naive and thinks we can somehow through magic or silly dreams create some unified nation of space explorers. Just look at what is occurring in Europe and tell me we can somehow have unity or the nature of the EU’s true intentions. We need sovereignty, we need free association, we need our tribes who we like to be with. You want to start a space organization, fine but don’t think we can somehow all magically get along and do it together singing around a camp fire seeing rainbows in the sky.

First of all, thank you for taking the time to read my post! I definitely appreciate it!

To your point, “This is a silly dream of a child who remains naive and thinks we can somehow through magic or silly dreams create some unified nation of space explorers.” I would argue the opposite, that the idea that this kind of tribal sovereignty is the only way is more childlike in the sense that it’s comparable to an “I don’t want to share” kind of attitude, or “things that are different and challenging are too scary to try and understand.”

Truly, the only real thing that separates and divides humans is geography – and when you think about that, it’s pretty trivial. Government, religion, economics, culture, and even race to some extent – they are all social constructs. Fairly, you argue that this is inevitable through human nature, but at the same time we see time and time again that social constructs such as these are fluid and changing, definitely not static.

We’re moving towards a more pluralistic world – bumps in the road are such as what we are seeing in the EU are inevitable; there are always challenges to progress. Your idea of a sort of natural/innate tribalism is basically the idea of Social Identity Theory and there is indeed a counter theory that challenges it called Common Group Identity (I actually wrote a post about those ideas earlier if you’d like to read that as well).

Maybe you’re right that “there will always be diversity and cultural displacements and sovereign nations,” but to give in and accept the idea that trivial geographic and social boundaries will always rule us (and divide us) I believe is morally lazy.

@Eddie – The argument you present is conflicting and irrational. “Multiculturalism has been more of a disaster then (should be than*) ever a real solution.” For what issue is multiculturalism not a real solution, exactly? The next sentence after that states “there will always be diversity…and sovereign nations..and there is nothing wrong with this.” That is the dictionary definition of what multiculturalism is.

This post and the movie did not say that diversity is wrong, in fact the author of the post applauds it. Unity and diversity can and do actually coexist. Everywhere. There will always be challenges in unifying diverse cultures, but that does not mean it is not a goal worth the attempt. No rational person expects different cultures of people to “all magically get along”. It will always be a work in progress. Star Trek is fictional, and even so, the fictional planets and their respective cultures are constantly striving to improve their relations.

“There cannot be a world with one large united government with the goal of space in mind.” It’s not the endeavor of a single government, but you do know about the International Space Station (ISS), correct? That amazing human achievement involves several different countries/governments working together with the goal of space in mind. And it is succeeding. It is not “silly dreams.” It is already real life.

We will continue as a species, whether you as an individual want to participate or not, to reach further and go where no one has gone before. The desire and inspiration to explore our universe is something that we as humans will always share, no matter where we come from. We still have a long, long way to go before we are truly space explorers that can navigate our own star system and beyond, but together, and unified, we can aspire to and attain this goal.

But what we call the real world has perfectly evolved ecosystem of predators and prey too.

Predators are perfectly natural and if their prey happen to be humans or other aliens, that is perfectly natural too. It is even perfectly natural for cannibalism to exist within a species.

The key to the above ecological balance is the ratio of few predators to many prey. Thus, predatory aliens may naturally evolve to feed on planets of prey; this just takes the single planetary predator-prey relationship to the galactic scale.

Human morality is the deliberate denial of nature by forcing out human predatory social cannibals without accepting the truth that the effort to stamp out predatory social cannibalism is unnecessary because their population already naturally evolved to be less than the prey population and thus, nature will always keep the human race thriving without artificial morality.

Well forgive me if my comment doesn’t get to deep into politics or moral beliefs. But I’d just like to say that I enjoyed Star Trek Beyond! I enjoyed Into Darkness as well. Movies are very hard to make and we as fans of Star Trek should be grateful we even got these new star trek movies. Instead of bashing these new star trek movies for not sticking to the original “formula”, lets UNITE and be supportive. Its ok if you haven’t liked them all but its star trek, you can still be supportive even if you thought it was a bad movie. Anyways, nice post!

Thanks! Star Trek Beyond was great – I didn’t like Into Darkness as much as some of the others, but I still found a lot to enjoy in that one. I’m with you, though, the new movies are definitely a lot of fun.